


Last Bright Routes

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc, Episode: s02e06 Redux, Episode: s04e24 Gethsemane, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 10:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3131369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully POV during Gethsemane and Redux.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Bright Routes

**Author's Note:**

> This is my final gift for tlynnfic at xf_santa. When asked to specify what she'd like as a gift, she said: I love fic and graphics of any kind are welcome. As far as pairings, I'm a hardcore Mulder/Scully shipper, but Krycek/Scully, M/S/K, and M/K ARE guilty pleasures of mine. I'm quite fond of introspective, character-driven, inner-monologue-type fics and am a big fan of post-eps and missing scenes as opposed to casefiles. I *HEART* angst. An element of romance is always welcome, but not necessary. UST is just as welcome as RST and any rating is fine. I would be a happy fangirl to receive anything Scully-centric.
> 
> Many, many thanks to scarletbaldy for managing to beta this before her vacation. I am very much obliged. Thanks also to Anne Sexton for inspirations from her poem Her Kind. The line Scully quotes at the end is from Moby Dick.

_The unmistakable smell of death._ Years of airport paperbacks have taught me that this is a phrase detective novels like, bandying it about as though corpses are common as marigolds and people routinely sniff them.  
  
Regular people, I mean.  
  
And the smell isn't even the same every time. It's akin to saying "the unmistakable smell of perfume." What are the details of this particular death? Are we talking a quiet drifting off in bed? Mottled green decomposition under a mattress? Slashed throat with Pollock-esque gouts and flourishes of arterial blood splashed ceiling to floor? They all have markedly different bouquets, I assure you. But let me try and give you a general idea so that you too can know the unmistakable smell of death, should you stumble upon it. Death usually smells like raw meat, either fresh or in some stage of decay. Like clothes stiff with evacuated bowels and bladders, sometimes permeated by the cheap food of lonely rooms, the rotting garbage of abandoned alleys. Occasionally there is the copper scent of blood, which - because it is familiar to most people - can actually serve to mask the more unpleasant and frightening aromas. Most of these components are mingling here in Mulder's apartment, summoning the blowflies of Alexandria.  
  
At least I assume this to be the case. I can't smell very well because there is a malignant tumor sending exploratory tendrils of itself through my nervous system, and one strand has wound like ivy around my olfactory nerve. The cancer has metastasized and fleets of cellular mutineers sail through my bloodstream twenty-four hours a day, looting and pillaging the healthy tissue for bounty.  
  
Mulder doesn't know this. I keep meaning to tell him, of course, but I feel as though he'll take it worse than I did. All I have to do is die while he, condemned to life, will carry me with him alongside Samantha and his father until his aching heart finally gives out. I suppose I'm just trying to spare him the buildup.  
  
Here on the floor is the empty bowl of Scott Ostelhoff's cranium, still tacky with puddled blood. Why Mulder couldn't have committed suicide with his own weapon is beyond me, because self-inflicted shotgun wounds to the head are a tricky business, though they can be accomplished with the help of a wire hanger. Which, of course, Mulder forgot to plant at this scene. A quick glance reveals two different spatter patterns to the gray matter and blood, and an autopsy will quickly confirm what is plain as day to my eyes. Detective Somebody snaps back the white sheet with a flourish and asks me to identify the body, as though that shattered ruin of a face would look familiar to anyone.  
  
"It him?"  
  
I should say no. I should do a lot of things, really. I should have stayed at dinner with my brother, should have turned Mulder out from the inner sanctum of my home where he'd waited in the dark like a jungle cat to spring his news on me. I should have run from his crazy family and his crazy life and the burning thing that drives him forward. But he'd read my diary as Penny lay dying, and knew he could ask these things of me.  
  
"Yeah," I say to the detective, and wait for the lightning to strike.  
  
***  
  
Skinner's gone back to whatever hole he lives in and I am left in Vitagliano's lab to seethe in peace. The mindless rituals of PCR are calming as a cigarette after the morning I've had. Anneal the primers, Taq polymerase, thermocycle, wait and see if I have bizarre viral genetic material within. It's not exactly brain surgery, though maybe that can be my next DIY project.  
  
I called Ellen after my first day in the basement office. I told her my new partner was a near-mythical figure in Behavioral Sciences, that they still talked about "pulling a Spooky" over there and that I, armed only with a medical degree and a Sig, was now going to be somewhat responsible for this creature's actions.  
  
"What's he like?" Ellen wanted to know. "Is he like Rainman? An idiot savant?"  
  
"He's weird," I said. "But not in any diagnosable way."  
  
"Is he cute?" she persisted, having romanticized my job into a James Bond flick full of evening wear and mind-blowing casual sex. Which wasn't entirely unfair, given what happened with Jack Willis. God, that pathetic watch.  
  
"He's somewhat attractive," I hedged, because if I told her that Mulder wouldn't look amiss on the cover of GQ she'd have called Missy and the two of them would have cooked up some Lucy-and-Ethel scheme in an attempt to get me laid.  
  
"Go for it," Ellen advised. "Do something kinky with your handcuffs."  
  
I laughed and then hung up so I could go pack.  
  
If I had taken her advice, things might have gone differently. If I had slept with Mulder early on I wouldn't have let myself become addicted to him. I would have been more guarded, not let him graze my back as he held the door or call me at two in the morning without any sort of reproach. All of the elements were in place to have mixed business with pleasure that stormy night in Oregon, but instead he was a gentleman and told me about his long lost baby sister.  
  
I'm sure people talk. I'm a relative non-entity, but Mulder was the Golden Boy before he fell from grace and is good-looking to boot. I am therefore a person of interest by proxy, and so our joint endeavors attract speculation. He is magnetic and while I know how it looks when we're millimeters apart, I rarely find myself backing away from the scents of his soap and cologne. It's highly unprofessional - the way we stand like a demonstration of Xeno's paradox, the measure between us closing in on itself but never quite resolving.  
  
Not yet, at any rate, though I've been thinking about it again, particularly as I prepare to shuffle off this mortal coil. Last night there was an awful temptation to call his bluff and keep going. To let my clothes go whispering to the floor and then tumble down into the sheets with him, those long hands warm against the serpent on my back. To let him fill me up with life. But I won't because I'm too much in danger of losing myself in him already - this morning being Exhibit A. To add another dimension to whatever our relationship is would be too much, too rich; like eating steak and fudge three meals a day.  
  
Ed Jerse was supposed to be my salvation. He was my proof to myself that I was still attractive and interesting enough to end up with my clothes on a desirable stranger's floor. That I wasn't holding a ridiculous torch for my partner, that my annual Pap smear wasn't going to become what a med school friend used to refer to as "cobweb cleaning." He was a beautiful emotional wreck and perfectly suited to my needs. Except for the part where he was a homicidal maniac. And I wonder… if I had known all this was coming, would I have fought so hard in the bathroom?  
  
"Not everything is about you," I'd said to Mulder in the wake of that disaster, as if he couldn't read me like _Green Eggs and Ham_. It was the only time he was ever cruel to me. I should have made him order the stupid desk as a matter of principle, but since the X-Files will once again be a one-man division before long, it's probably just as well.  
  
And then Eddie Van Blundht and the Trojan horse of his guileless demeanor slipped right past my defenses. Like Mulder, I had wanted desperately to believe. And, like Mulder, this desire had left me looking a fool. We are both well overdue for reassessments of our most cherished notions.  
  
Mulder has become the greater body around which I orbit. His passion exceeds mine, his drive is stronger and I am swept alongside him in this delicate play of gravity and inertia. And so I pull back where I can, I hold fast to aphorisms out of habit and a desire to be a separate thing from him. It's all I can do at this point, standing as I am on the brink of eternity and nothingness. I have to set myself apart.  
  
If I loved him less, I could give him more.  
  
***  
  
Vitagliano's blazing hot probe is quietly doing its work while I glance with increasing anxiety at the clock. There's a thrill in ferreting out an unknown cause, the primum movens of strange calamity, but this is a bit personal for even my usual objectivity.  
  
In my other life - the one where I don't shoot people or disappear for months at a time or lie to FBI panels - I'd probably be going home for dinner now. I'd wanted to make a difference when I decided to leave medicine for the Tom Clancy dazzle of Special Agent-hood, but perhaps I should have better defined my terms. I never wanted to get to the heart of a nebulous conspiracy. I expected mail fraud and wire taps. I planned for the tedious predictability of the Tom Colton career fairytale.  
  
Truth is, I'll always be a pathologist first and an FBI agent second. I recite muscle insertions when I can't fall asleep and mentally append "which is the powerhouse of the cell" whenever I encounter the word _mitochondrion_. I still identify myself as a medical doctor, as though anyone might accuse me of attempting to perform an autopsy with nothing more grand than a Ph.D. in English Lit. I'm sure Mulder has added this obvious insecurity to whatever profile he's assembled. Don't mistake me: I love my job, but I was fluent in Scientist before I was fluent in Fed, and it's only natural to revert to one's mother tongue, especially in times of duress.  
  
Only two minutes have passed. I've already gone through the bony landmarks of the skull and mumbled some doggerel about innervation.  
  
 _The lingual nerve_  
Took a curve  
Around the hypoglossus.  
"Well I'll be fucked!"  
Said Wharton's duct,  
"The bastard's gone and crossed us!"  
  
I gaze at my gel, fretting over possible errors in the PCR and my load technique. The tiniest mistake could be catastrophic, and it's not like I can just skip over to the supply cabinet for another vial of Mystery Virus. I force my brain to stop antagonizing itself and return to the numbing distraction of medical minutiae.  
  
In cases of known myocardial infarction, remember MONA: morphine, oxygen, nitrates, aspirin. Unless right ventricular infarction is suspected - in which case hold the nitrates.  
  
The Frank-Starling law dictates that the greater the fill volume of the ventricle at diastole, the greater the resulting systolic discharge volume.  
  
Daniel Waterston, eminent cardiac researcher, taught me more about the human heart than he ever intended. Had anyone surveyed my classmates to see which student was destined to contribute to the ruination of the doctor's marriage, no one would have even considered the mousy redhead in the front row with the too-white Keds and the humorless demeanor. I certainly never considered myself a viable candidate for such a position and strove only to impress Dr. Waterston with insightful questions and detailed documentation of his every word.  
  
My post-lecture brown nosing turned into conversations about how I missed my family back East, how his wife was never around these days, how his daughter resented him for the long hours demanded by our chosen profession. And when his heavy hand slid from my shoulder blade to my waist I knew deep down that he'd had this in mind all along, but I let myself pretend that he was simply swept off his feet by my perpetually raised hand and pages of cramped notes.  
  
I wasn't a virgin, but prior encounters had been with those as relatively inexperienced as I. Daniel brought matters to a whole new level for a number of reasons. For one, I could quit faking satisfaction. Equally significant was the discovery that Control Freak Dana didn't mind a few nights and weekends off. At least not in bed. But - perhaps as a balance to sexual submission - I also discovered that I got a perverse charge from denying him availability on demand. And that my denial turned a run-of-the-mill affair into something new and tantalizing for him. Clearly he was used to more adoring underlings warming his sheets.  
  
I liked the frank disappointment in his eyes when I turned down dinner, or the need in them when I'd gather my scrubs from the hotel room floor half a day early. I found that providing sex and withholding affection made him offer me things. I politely refused the material goods, but savored the rest.  
  
"I'll leave her, Dana," he said one night.  
  
And he would have. I considered it briefly, saw my whole future laid out before me. My academic standing was unlikely to leave me as Daniel Waterston's Bimbo for the rest of my life, and I knew that affairs ending in remarriage lend the whole thing a glamour of respectability and romance. Daniel was everything I wanted. He was brilliant, rather dashing, and wealthy. I cared for him a great deal. I could expect a reasonable degree of happiness with him. Perhaps even a few siblings for the sullen Maggie. But I saw also that once he possessed me the allure would wear thin. Bored with the pursuit being over, he'd eventually start sleeping with Dana 2.0 and I'd hardly be in a position to call him out on it.  
  
His hand traced circles on my twenty-five year old thigh as he buried his face in my shoulder and nipped at my throat. "Tell me to leave her and I will." He said he loved me. He told me I was beautiful and waited, I suppose, for me to set him free.  
  
He didn't love me and in that moment I knew it. My seeming indifference obsessed him, challenged him. But it was nothing more than an unexpected intellectual problem. He just wanted _me_ to love _him_ because I was supposed to. All he really desired was for me to make a passable public fairy tale of his years of infidelity. I was unassuming enough to put a decent face on it all.  
  
I gave him my body and my blood, then refused him absolution.  
  
***  
  
I stare at the X-ray film in horrified fascination. I obviously believed it enough to test, and yet I am stunned to have it confirmed. Someone designed the demon in me, nurtured and tended it until it could sustain itself, then released it into the wild of my animal cells. It took root in my tissue as it never could in the tiny creature entombed within the ice. It did as it was engineered to do. Viruses are elegant little machines of survival.  
  
It's all true, just as Kritschgau said. They did this to me and the women in Allentown and dozens - maybe thousands - more like us. Who knew government conspirists were so misogynistic? I try not to let my mind wander to the dystopian reproductive nightmares of Huxley and Atwood.  
  
In a way, it's the indignity of it that burns the most. I have told myself all along that I am different from those women, with their silly MUFON meetings and their memories of white places. I'm a _doctor_ for Christ's sake. I'm an FBI agent. People are not supposed to treat me as though I don't matter.  
  
It is terrifying to realize one is disposable. It's what had upset me so profoundly about Pfaster, something I could never articulate to Mulder. However perversely, serial killers tend to get their ya-yas from the living. It is, ultimately, the human element that attracts them. The impassioned screaming, the erotic spurts of hot blood, the fluttering eyelids of the dying. But Donnie Pfaster parted ways with all but the most depraved of his brethren and took his pleasures from the dead. Killing was a mere formality, a means to an end. Those sad, broken girls were just a source of spare parts to him. I believe that such a rift from the basic principles of humanity made him a thing entirely Other. My encounter with him is the only one that still haunts.  
  
I sat in that closet and was half-glad he had gagged me because I think my own screams might have driven me insane before Mulder showed up. And if this is what can happen to the living, what is there to fear from death?  
  
***  
  
The early autumn night has come down, wrapping DC in a chilly embrace. The body I've claimed as Agent Mulder's, fallen on his own sword, lies somewhere in repose. I am on my way now to weave the truth into a gossamer snare of lies and with nothing left to hope for in this life, I pray only that I can save Mulder from himself. He is off doing God only knows what, as we'd agreed that the less I know, the better for both of us.  
  
I'm actually a fairly good liar, however reluctant, and I will sell the story well and without hesitation. What I learned today about the identity of the deadly thing winding itself through me has severed all allegiance to the people I am about to face. There's no more denying we have been used to some nefarious end. That Mulder, bless his paranoid soul, has been led around by the nose and that I, as a result, have been as well.  
  
Though I'd say my nose has suffered more than his, quite frankly. And how very like my mother to tell Bill. Missy and I always knew when Mom was pissed at one of us because the other would get a phone call. Charlie, tired of the enmeshment, moved away years ago and now just sends large checks on birthdays and Christmas. I wonder if he paid for that nicely starched maid who simpered as though the Scully clan was anything more than lace-curtain Irish.  
  
I glance in the rearview and see my scraped cheek through the heavy concealer I've caked over the wound. Goddamned Kritschgau. Goddamned Mulder and his goddamned ice core samples. Now knowing for certain that this disease has been engineered to teach Mulder some kind of lesson, I'll lie all day long to out the sons of bitches who did it. Any decent sociopath would have shot me point blank in the head by now instead of resorting to this protracted torture. I know what the end looks like, and it contains bedpans.  
  
I'm so tired of trying to figure out who is protecting what. All I know for certain is that whoever took Samantha Mulder greatly underestimated the stubbornness of her big brother. And that if - as I suspect - Skinner is at the heart of it all, they will be finding pieces of the Assistant Director scattered throughout the Hoover building for years to come. I expect Mulder's vengeance will be operatic, which offers me a very dark sort of comfort.  
  
Skinner knew something was up this morning, and I wonder which of us will be more suspicious of the other at this evening's inquiry. Our blowout in the hallway at American University today left me shaking. Challenging authority is hard for me, though this inhuman duplicity has allowed me to abandon all deference and sense of duty to my titular superiors.  
  
I park my trusty Ford and turn it off, all dark and silent as the interior light dims. I gather my files, the strange and terrible story of The Life and Death of Dana Scully contained on the pages within, and I get out of the car. The leaves that have been cast down upon the earth are moldering in the grass and gutters, breaking down to nourish growing things in springtime. My heels are muted by their dirty sludge, and I bow my head against the creeping fingers of the wind as I make my way to the door.  
  
If Hell is what waits for liars, I'm prepared to burn there with the glory of a martyr.  
  
***  
  
I have been taken into custody for contempt of Congress, and this hastily convened panel of inquiry is nowhere near making me break a sweat. I don't feel very well for other reasons though. The chemo and radiation have failed to do much more than piss off whatever's living in me, but have completely destroyed my appetite. I can't remember the last time I ate and my blood sugar's got to be close to bottoming out.  
  
I feel naked with their eyes upon me, now that they know they'll probably be sending my mother a fruit basket and form letter by the New Year. I look down at them with a certain cold haughtiness as I speak of the treachery they've fostered, of the vipers in their midst. I wonder who among these honorable men and women knows how the story ends already, which of them were complicit in the tale I'm telling.  
  
And now it comes. The brazen lie to this esteemed assemblage of alleged truth-seekers. It feels good to do it, to make a choice and be a player instead of a pawn. For God so loved the world that He made us to be free-willed.  
  
Skinner enters as the room as the words still hang in the air. We acknowledge one another for a fraction of a second and I suddenly feel so weak I don't know if I can continue. What the hell am I doing here, trying to take charge of these villainous reindeer games?  
  
The truth is in me, I told Mulder. Now I have the means to prove it. I touch my blot results, evidence so simple a child could read it. "What I have here is scientific evidence-"  
  
Thick red drops splash heavily onto the binder. When I touch my fingers to my nose, they come away wet and red. I focus on Blevins while I still can so that they will understand the full consequences of the small black bars on my autoradiographs. I stand before them until I can't anymore. But it's all right - let them watch me fall in this final act of J’Accuse. Let them see firsthand the collateral damage of dancing with the devil.  
  
Skinner looms overhead in the narrowing tunnel. "You…" I manage as the room fades into a dim gray mist. _For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee._ I am tumbling into the darkness against which I have fought so hard, and a tidal wave of panic crushes the breath out of me. There is so much left undone in my life and I am furious with the injustice of it. I am supposed to die old and gray, dreaming memories in a four-poster bed.  
  
But there is a calm when the fear and anger ebb away, an acceptance that there are things yet to come on the other side of the veil. I forgive myself my shortcomings and acknowledge that, in this at least, I have done my best.  
  
I am not ashamed to die.


End file.
